The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  Pencils were poised for taking notes, but when Ada opened her mouth to speak, no sound came out. Some of the students looked puzzled, others snickered. Cam chided them softly, but she herself seemed bemused. Ada whispered, “Excuse me,” took a sip of lukewarm tea from her cup, and started over. This time her voice shuddered through several sentences before finally arriving full force. While the presentation had taken a full forty minutes when she rehearsed it, there were still twenty minutes on the clock when she raced to her conclusion. She stood staring at the unsympathetic faces, willing them to disappear.

  “Well, that was right informative, wasn’t it,” Cam said. “I think I learned some things myself.” She prodded them for questions, but the room remained silent. “Well, let’s say ‘Thank you, Miss Shook’ and get out of her hair.”

  “Thank you, Miss Shook,” echoed through the room.

  Cam waited as they filed back into the hallway one by one. “Thanks for your time,” she called to Ada, with a smile that seemed forced and held none of its previous sparkle.

  She knows I am duller than dirt, Ada thought. “I am so sorry,” she said quickly, before Cam could leave and snip off their friendship in the bud. She actually reached out and touched the sleeve of Cam’s linen blouse—the sleeve! Cam’s eyes traveled to the spot Ada’s fingers had brushed.

  And then Ada let the truth erupt out of her. “I have this frightful fear of public speaking. It dates back to having to recite Timrod’s ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’ in fourth grade. After that, the boys all called me ‘Ada Sh-sh-oo-oo-k.’ ”

  Cam laughed, her head snapping back with genuine delight. “Well, that experience would be enough to traumatize anybody,” she replied. “Don’t worry, you did fine. Nice and succinct. Miss Gladdie would’ve droned on and on till we were all catatonic. The glassier our eyes, the better.”

  At the door, Cam glanced back over her shoulder. “How about a movie this Saturday?” she asked. “You seen Band of Angels yet?”

  She shook her head, afraid to speak and spoil everything again. She had avoided that particular movie because Natalie had written to her that it was “no Gone with the Wind, that’s for sure!”

  “I’m warning you, though, I might insist you recite the odious ‘Ode,’” Cam said. “Just for fun.” Ada heard her soft whistle again as the door closed behind her.

  § § §

  Natalie had been right: the movie was no Gone with the Wind. Clark Gable played a Southern gentleman once again, but he looked drained and old. All the girls she knew, including Natalie, considered Rhett Butler the embodiment of sex appeal. “My goodness, the way he carried Scarlett up those stairs!” Natalie had practically drooled when they saw the re-release of the movie together in college. But to Ada, Rhett’s threat to snap Scarlett’s neck with his bare hands was just menacing.

  “I bet you’ve read this book, too,” Cam had said when they met in the lobby of the theater to buy popcorn. Ada admitted she had, and that reading was her great escape. “‘A good book can carry you into a different world,’ that’s what a dear librarian told me when I was a girl. She said reading is like being on a wonderful trip, or engaging in a conversation with the writer.”

  “A conversation. I never thought of it that way. I like it.” Although Ada had her change purse ready, Cam waved her off and paid for both bags of popcorn. “My treat. You’re the new girl. So tell me about the ‘dear librarian.’ Did she inspire your career?”

  No one had ever asked her that before, and she was glad for the shift in topic. Ada had been inwardly struggling with how to tell Cam that the “conversation” with Robert Penn Warren, author of Band of Angels, had confused her, and that she had closed the cover on his novel unsure what he thought or wanted her to think. At times, it conformed to what Ada had learned in school—that benevolent planters treated slaves like family, and that slavery was not as bad as bleeding hearts made out. But Warren portrayed as many evil planters as kind, and the Yankees in the novel were, for the most part, unredeemable interlopers. Who were the villains and who were the good guys?

  The movie, it turned out, was just as baffling. Ada spent most of it aware that Cam was sitting right next to her, formulating an opinion of the movie, and that she would be expected to share her own thoughts after. With Natalie, that had always felt natural, because she knew her friend wouldn’t judge her. In retrospect, though, they had never discussed anything too political or that brought their very upbringing into question. And Ada would have never commented on how lovely a particular actress was—she knew she was only supposed to notice and appreciate the men.

  When they exited the theater and Cam asked the inevitable “What did you think?,” Ada picked through her thoughts cautiously. “Well, they sure truncated the story,” she replied as they strolled down the street toward a coffee shop. “In the book, Manty has a full life after Hamish. She gets married and everything.”

  “Interesting,” Cam said, but she said she hadn’t read the novel, so the conversation stumbled. “You know, Warren started out pro-segregation, one of the Southern Agrarians. He made a public shift after the Brown decision, even published a piece in Life about the South searching for its soul. He interviewed everybody from the NAACP right down to citizens’ council folks.”

  Ada felt embarrassed not to know this, but her final year in college had been a blur as she struggled to finish the requirements for her library science degree before her scholarship money ran out. “I seem to have missed that particular issue,” she said.

  “I was glad to see one of our venerable Southern writers making the shift. But I still think Lillian Smith is the one to read on the topic of segregation. You know Lillian Smith? Author of Strange Fruit? Now that would make some movie! No benevolent planters or happy darkies singing spirituals on the riverbank!”

  Ada nodded, but once again had nothing to add. “I have heard of Miss Smith, of course,” she said, “but I haven’t read her work.”

  “Aha! Something I’ve read that Madam Librarian hasn’t! You’d like her, I think. She’s a truly independent woman. Never married. She wrote a nonfiction book that I highly recommend—Killers of the Dream. She talks about how fiercely folks will hold onto something they just take for granted. Like segregation.”

  Cam seemed bent on discussing politics, and Ada badly wanted to get back to something that felt more comfortable to her, like books. Once when she had admired Nat’s conversational skills, Nat had told her she could turn around any dialogue with modesty or a little joke at her own expense. “This will sound funny,” Ada said now to Cam, with what she hoped was a self-deprecating laugh, “but I’m afraid I don’t have a real strong opinion about that.”

  They hesitated on the threshold of the coffee shop, the awkwardness of the moment overtaking them. Cam had been about to reach for the door handle, but her hand went down to her side instead. Her face was tight as a rubber band stretched to its limit.

  “Now I know you are a smart girl,” Cam said, lowering her voice as if to keep it under control. “You don’t seem like a fiddle-dee-dee kind of girl to me. My mother saddled me with the name Camellia, and I grew up around belles. But you? You have read Robert Penn Warren, for God’s sake. You live in Dixie in this day and age, you are a librarian, and yet you don’t have an opinion on segregation? I don’t find that funny, Ada, I find it damn sad.”

  The swearing made her flinch, and Ada drew back a little, holding her pocketbook in front of her like a shield. Disparate thoughts about segregation tumbled in her head. She knew it was wrong to treat Negroes differently, but there was the

  question of states’ rights being violated by the Supreme Court ruling—at least, that was her daddy’s view. Her pastor had preached against integration more than once, and the evils that could come from “mixing the races.” Miss Ruthie, though, had encouraged her to see things through more than one lens: Be an independent thinker, Ada. Miss Ruthie, she suspected, would have told her to ask if she could borrow the Lillian Smith bo
ok from Cam.

  But before Ada could suggest that, Cam blurted out, “You know, I made a mistake. I forgot I have to be somewhere at four. I’ll have to take a rain check on coffee. I guess I’ll see you next week.”

  Ada was left standing in front of the coffee shop still clutching her purse and wondering how an afternoon she had looked forward to had turned out so wrong.

  § § §

  On Monday, Ada was getting ready to take lunch and leave the library in Mrs. Pierce’s hands. She was hoping to run into Cam in the faculty lounge so she could tell her she’d been thinking all weekend about what she’d said about segregation. But her plans changed when, from the window of the library, Ada witnessed the attack unfold.

  Mary Burney was sitting on one of the low brick walls surrounding the schoolyard, her books and notebooks stacked next to her. She looked the way she always did, isolated and stoic. In the two weeks since classes had begun, Ada had never once seen her with anyone, not in the hallways, not at recess or in the library.

  Ada had spoken to Mary only once, when the girl seemed to need help finding a book. Principal Norris had said she was a straight-A student, with a reading level far above her grade level. Maybe Ada could steer her toward choices like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or The Diary of Anne Frank.

  “You like novels?” Ada had asked when she found Mary staring into the stacks of fiction as if she didn’t know where to begin.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mary ran a finger tentatively over a few spines.

  “There’s a lot to pick from,” Ada said. “If you’d like a recommendation, I’m happy to assist. What appeals to you?”

  “My daddy said I should just start at the A’s and work my way through,” Mary replied, closing down the exchange.

  “Well, that’s good advice,” Ada said, not one to come between a girl and her father, although she would have put more thought to Mary’s interests. When Mary was checking out, Ada saw that she had indeed gone the alphabetical route and selected Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

  “Excellent choice,” Ada said, and Mary allowed herself to smile.

  Now, in the schoolyard, Mary was reading, possibly the very book she’d borrowed, when a white boy strode up to her, cocky and self-assured. Ada knew he was a seventh-grader named Virgil Chance; she’d had to issue him a detention slip one afternoon for disrupting the library. Like Mary, he was small for his age, and probably fodder for older bullies. His words were indistinct through the open windows, but snarling described the expression on his face. Two equally angry-looking boys stood behind him. Virgil poked Mary’s shoulder, and she turned herself and her book away, as if to ignore him, which only served to rile him more. He poked her other shoulder, and Mary gathered up her belongings to leave. At that moment, Virgil leaned forward and directed a wad of spit onto the front of Mary’s crisp white blouse, while the boys behind him whooped with laughter. Mary stood up, and Virgil pushed her a third time, even more forcefully, until she fell backward into a hawthorn bush.

  “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a nigger by the toe!” The common children’s rhyme soared through the windows.

  “Go away!” Mary shrieked, then muttered something Ada couldn’t hear.

  Ada scanned the yard for the teachers on duty. But although Miss Kilwin and Mrs. Lamott’s heads turned, they made no move in Mary’s direction. Ada had overheard Miss Kilwin grumbling in the faculty lounge: “Well, why would they want to go to a school where they aren’t welcome?”

  Ada’s first thought was to run across the hall and ask for Cam’s help. Cam would leave her class, walk onto the schoolyard with the authority she commanded, and haul that boy’s behind down to the principal’s office. She wouldn’t act self-righteous about it; she would simply act.

  But there was no time to engage Cam. A few more children, girls and boys, had joined the original three, and a circle was forming around Mary. Each time the girl tried to free herself, a hand came out to push her back. And still, the teachers in the yard seemed unconcerned. Mrs. Kilwin actually consulted her wristwatch, as if willing recess to end.

  Ada left the library without a word to Mrs. Pierce and almost tripped down the side steps to the schoolyard. She parted the circle of students roughly. Despite their intimidating manner, they were still just children, and it was surprisingly easy to yank Virgil by his skinny arm. “Ow!” he moaned. “You’re hurting me, lady!”

  “You will address me as Miss Shook,” she said in a voice that came out so strong it surprised her. As she dragged him toward the building, she glanced back and saw Mrs. Lamott approach the students, who were already dispersing without their ringleader. “All right, that’s enough of that!” the teacher said, clapping her hands.

  Principal Norris was in conversation with a mother in the reception area adjoining his office when Ada arrived with Virgil, who squealed like a stuck pig.

  “Is there a problem, Miss Shook?”

  “This boy spit on Mary Burney,” Ada replied, releasing her grip on Virgil’s arm. “He spit on her.”

  “Called me ‘white trash,’” Virgil hissed.

  “I saw you start it, Virgil,” Ada said. “Don’t tell fibs.”

  “Well, now,” the principal said. “Virgil, have a seat in there.” He motioned toward the open door of his office, and Virgil shuffled through it.

  “Miss Shook,” Principal Norris began. “You remember your interview for this job?”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “I told you that a school librarian should not be an activist.”

  The principal’s words made Ada’s face hot. She was being called out, and in front of a parent. Even Virgil could probably hear the dressing-down through the open office door. “I don’t understand,” she said, lowering her voice. “You told me to serve all the students.”

  “Including young Mr. Chance,” the principal said. “We can’t have students calling each other names, now can we?” He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his brow. “I will handle this from here, Miss Shook. But thank you for bringing the matter to my attention.”

  Why is using the term white trash name-calling, but nigger is not? Ada wanted to ask. But Principal Norris slammed his office door behind him, leaving her standing there like an errant child.

  Back in the library, Ada did the unthinkable—she asked the three students who were studying to leave, told Mrs. Pierce she was no longer needed that day, and then locked the door from the inside. She collapsed into her desk chair, overwhelmed with sobs so violent she didn’t hear the first knocks at the door. The rattling of the doorknob and the sound of Cam’s voice, low and insistent, finally got her attention. “Ada, it’s me—Cam. Open up. Please.”

  Ada dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief, leaving dots of mascara behind on the printed cotton. She blew her nose, then unlocked the door.

  A few other teachers, including Mrs. Lamott, had gathered behind Cam in the hallway, poking their heads around to get a better look at Ada’s distress. “. . . locked the door!” she heard Mrs. Pierce say. “Can you imagine!” Cam slipped in and shut the rest of the hallway out.

  “Cam, I . . .” Ada started but couldn’t finish.

  “I know, darlin’. It’s all over school.” The endearment, which no one had ever called her except men being too familiar, sent a chill up Ada’s arms.

  “I should have gotten Mary out of there instead,” Ada said. “I did it all wrong.”

  “You did it just fine. Mary is shook up, but she is a strong girl. Norris is going to send her home. Though I’m not sure what good that will do. It’s that little no-’count redneck who should be sent home—on suspension.”

  “I don’t understand what happened in the office. I actually thought he was mad at me.”

  “Norris is a Southern-fried hypocrite,” Cam said. “I’m sure you know a million folks just like him, polite as Sunday on the outside and bigoted as all get-out on the inside.” Cam looped a strong arm around Ada’s shoulders. The intimate gesture took her as
much by surprise as the word darlin’, and she stiffened. She had cuddled up to Natalie on occasion, but this felt different. Ada could smell Cam’s fragrance, something with the light aroma of oranges.

  “Hey, can you believe it?” Cam said. “We are talking out loud in the library—in the middle of the school day!” She startled Ada again by launching into the song she had whistled on the first day of school: “‘But what can I do in here/To catch your ear/I love you madly madly, Madam Librarian . . . Marian.”

  It was not a song for a woman to sing to another woman, but Cam performed it lightheartedly, like the friend Ada needed. She actually found herself laughing as Cam fumbled the words and substituted a lot of da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dums. Within a few minutes, Ada had blown her nose one last time and reopened the library door.

  § § §

  By the end of the week, Mary had withdrawn from Central. As her homeroom teacher, Cam got the news early and told Ada. The daily paper carried the story, which quoted Mary’s father.

  “The principal told us he could not protect our daughter from further incidents,” Theo Burney stated. “So after much thought, Mrs. Burney, Mary and I have made the difficult decision to change schools before more time goes by. Central is not an atmosphere conducive to Mary’s learning.” For the rest of the school year, he said, Mary would live with her mother’s aunt “up north” and attend an integrated academy.

  Mr. Norris made no official announcement, and soon Mary was just an anecdote, an interruption in an otherwise orderly school year. “He told me it was best not to make ‘a fuss,’” Cam said. “You can bet he’s breathing a sigh of relief. But if he thinks integration is over at this school or in this city, he’d best think again.”

  That was how Ada and Cam began having coffee together most days after school, their time together so crammed with conversation that it sometimes even spilled over into an early supper. They talked shop, of course, and current events, but Cam also taught Ada about sports while she kept Cam abreast of all the latest books she’d read reviews of. It was the best part of the day for Ada, though she still had no word for it but “friendship.”